Kam K.H. Ng

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering

With the increasing demand for air transport, numerous airports have exceeded their available capacity, resulting in more frequent congestion and disruptions. Therefore, airport gate assignment plans must prioritise robustness to alleviate congestion, absorb disruptions, and maintain high service levels. Given the uncertainties in airside operation...

This study discusses the challenges and solutions surrounding the scheduling of electric airport ferry vehicles (EAFVs) in the aviation industry. With the rise of electric vehicle technology and the push for sustainability, the adoption of EAFVs presents a significant opportunity for reducing emissions in airport ground transportation. However, sch...

Human-cybernetic interfaces (HCI) focuses on the integration and synergy of human-centric design, human factors (HFs) and economics, and human–machine interaction (HMI). The scrutiny of single pilot operations (SPO) approval from civil aviation authorities (CAAs) is subject to the aviation safety and pilot capability during exceptional handling and...

Accurate and reliable prediction has profound implications to a wide range of applications. In this study, we focus on an instance of spatio-temporal learning problem--traffic prediction--to demonstrate an advanced deep learning model developed for making accurate and reliable forecast. Despite the significant progress in traffic prediction, limite...

With the escalating volume of air traffic, the complexity of airport ground operations intensifies, particularly in bustling hubs. This study addresses the gate assignment problem with time windows (GAPTW) to optimize the scheduling of flight operations near the terminal area (including arrival, parking, and departure). Unlike conventional approach...

With the rapid development of novel vehicle technologies, air taxis are becoming a new transport servicing model to achieve better urban air mobility (UAM) systems. The UAM system can mitigate severe traffic congestion problems on the ground in many metropolitan areas effectively. This research aims to design a robust UAM network to serve broader m...

Pedestrians, particularly susceptible to road traffic crashes, experience varying injury severities influenced by age and time shifts. This research aims to investigate the differences and temporal shifts in factors influencing pedestrian injury severities across different age groups. To achieve this, three random parameters binary logit models wit...

Drone-supported last-mile humanitarian logistics applications play a crucial role in the rapid and efficient delivery of essential relief items, such as medicine, blood, and vaccines, during disaster and emergency situations. This paper explores a novel drone-supported relief facility location problem (DSRFLP) aimed at establishing an effective dro...

With the rapid development of novel vehicle technologies, electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles are becoming a new transport servicing model to achieve better urban air mobility (UAM) systems. The UAM systems can efficiently utilise low-altitude airspace resources, providing a solution to alleviate congestion in urban ground traff...

The escalating demand for air travel has significant environmental implications, such as air pollution and noise nuisance, compelling airports to mitigate their negative impacts on the environment. Operations Research (OR) has played a crucial role in optimizing environment-oriented airport traffic flow management problems, including gate assignmen...

The COVID-19 pandemic severely impacts the air transport industry. However, the availability of vaccines and achieving community immunity may change one's travel anxiety and the intention to travel after the pandemic. This study employs covariance-based structural equation modelling to investigate the relationships between the willingness to be vac...

Objective This paper investigates the effects of using different decision-making models on pilots’ performance while facing non-normal flight circumstances. Background The captain must quickly make appropriate decisions once an aircraft faces emergency. Usually, human error is one primary cause of accidents, which inevitably affects the captain’s...

The captain’s cognitive activity, like situation awareness (SA) variations, in single-pilot operation (SPO) should differ from that during two-crew operation (TCO) [1, 2]. This study aims to reveal the pilot’s performance and cognitive changes from the neurophysiological perspective during SPO. The pilot flying shall maintain a stable flight from t...

Recent studies in four-dimensional flight trajectories attempted to identify the impacts of various flight trajectories and maneuver parameters on air traffic management efficiency and aviation safety. The previous studies attempted to cluster trajectories based on spatial scales. However, these might require converting the flight trajectories to e...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively used in urban environments for logistics, parcel delivery and surveillance, and the development of air taxi services. Given the dynamic nature of urban air mobility in terms of decision-making time limit, wind dynamics and other external factors, one should consider their safe and efficient oper...

The practice of Aircraft Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) outsourcing has changed airline companies' decision-making processes in both operational and tactical levels. Specifically, the aircraft heavy maintenance service provided by an independent maintenance service company alleviates airlines' fixed-asset investments and daily operations reg...

The rate of human errors would increase as air traffic control officers (ATCOs) lose situation awareness (SA), which could also be affected by their perceived workloads. Recognising ATCOs SA inadequacy is crucial for ensuring traffic safety. This paper aims to propose a two-phase analytical methodology for revealing SA-related neuro-physiological p...

The aviation industry is in a recession with the rapid and immense outbreak of COVID-19 under globalisation. The future young aviation professionals might suffer from a ‘career shock’. This study analysed the post-pandemic career prospects for Hong Kong aviation students using mixed-method research considering specialised and licensed training. We...

Teams formulated by aviation professionals are essential in maintaining a safe and efficient aerodrome environment. Nonetheless, the shared situational awareness between the flight crews under adverse weather conditions might be impaired. This research aims to evaluate the impact of a proposed enhancement in communication protocol on cognitive work...

Minimization of approaching time and maximization of the utilization of air route and airport resources are the two ultimate goals of air traffic control. This research considers arrival sequence and the uncertain arrival times at entry waypoints of flights and investigates the impact of air traffic controller specific parameters in the model. The...

The agnostic robotic paradigm (ARP) represents a recent development as the use of robots becomes more common, and there is a need for agnostic robots to cope with rich artificial objects environments. All parties and stakeholders need to seize the imminent opportunity and act on ushering in the revolutionary changes of contemporary robotic and faci...

To implement Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for industrial systems, it is paramount to conduct early fault prognosis on the systems to ensure the stability and reliability during their entire lifecycles. Investigations on early fault prognosis have been actively carried out, but there is a lack of systematic analysis and summary of the dev...

Aviation emission has always been regarded as the major contributor to climate and atmosphere changes. The recent research suggested that flights can be re-routed from sufficiently cold and humid atmospheres to mitigate the level of contrail production in particular regions during the flight planning stage. To address the needs, a weather data-driv...

Aircrafts are separated by a specified distance via the instructions of the air traffic control officers, so the trailing aircraft would not suffer from the wake vortex effect nor actual conflicts. However, with the surging air transport volume in the past decades, the current model of terminal manoeuvring area could not satisfy the growing demand....

Automation technologies have been deployed widely to boost the efficiency of production and operations, to trim the complicated process, and to reduce the human error involved. Nevertheless, aviation remains human-centred and requires collaboration between different parties. Given the lack of a collaborative decision-making training platform for ai...

In recent years, the global civil aviation industry has been developing rapidly. Due to the rising demand for air transportation, airports are confronting saturation problems. Heavy traffic and long queues are expected for take-off and landing. Hence, the physical constraints have magnified the problem of having surging flight delays. Yet, the oper...

As the backbone of Communications, Navigation and Surveillance Systems for Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM), Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is a surveillance technology and digital-technology enabler relying on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). The onboard ADS-B Out system broadcasts the aircraft’s real-time digital...

Air traffic congestions for processing relief cargos under post-disaster relief scenarios are common, due to high transport demands within a short time. To enhance the resilience of relief operations at airport, an optimization problem of relief air cargo transportations involving aircraft sequencing and loading/unloading within a designated hangar...

The air transport industry is suffering from the restriction of borders under the COVID-19 pandemic. Some say the industry may recover with the availability of vaccines, and some might even expect a “travel boom” just after the pandemic. In 2021, the latest update of the pandemic is the availability of vaccines, which might alter one’s consideratio...

The rapid growth of the aviation industry and air travel brought along increased air traffic in the airspace, greater fuel consumption, and more engine emissions. It is estimated that the aviation sector contributes roughly 4.9% of total radiative forcing in Earth’s atmosphere in 2005, with the CO2 and NO emissions expected to rise by a factor of 2...

Safety-critical systems like air traffic control (ATC) are usually less automated than might be expected by the public, so human intelligence will remain at the core in the decision-making (DM) process. Meanwhile, human factors (HFs) need to be fully considered in the DM process, which can design the ATC system to be more intelligent and more adapt...

Though American sign language (ASL) has gained recognition from the American society, few ASL applications have been developed with educational purposes. Those designed with real-time sign recognition systems are also lacking. Leap motion controller facilitates the real-time and accurate recognition of ASL signs. It allows an opportunity for design...

The robust traffic flow modelling approach offers a perspicacious and holistic surveillance for flight activities in a nearby terminal manoeuvring area. The real time flight information expedites the streaming control of terminal operations using computational intelligence. Hence, in order to reduce the adverse effect of severe uncertainty and the...

Nowadays, Hong Kong International Airport faces the issues of saturation and overload. The difficulties of selecting taxiways and reducing the lead time at the runway holding position are the severe consequences that appeared from increasing the number of passengers and increased cargo movement to Hong Kong International Airport but without constru...

The occurrence of unplanned aircraft shortages and disruption of flight schedules during the day-today operations of airlines is inevitable. When equipment failure causes unsafe flight, the aircraft will be grounded or temporarily delayed when the weather shuts down the airport or the required flight crew is unavailable. Real-time decisions must be...

With the recent developments in robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI), academics and industrial practitioners are now pursuing robust and adaptive decision making (DM) in real-life engineering applications and automated business workflows and processes to accommodate context awareness, adaptation to environment and custo...

The rapid growth of the airline industry has caused an enormous demand in the context of air transport and air traffic congestion in several hub airports. In order to alleviate this situation and resolve the imbalance between the arrival and departure rate, efficient runway usage in airport capacity management is an immediate and feasible solution...

Virtual reality (VR) has been applied in many different sectors, including manufacturing and engineering industries as well as in the healthcare industry where VR-equipped health products can provide better prevention, rehabilitation, and palliative care in a user-friendly environment. The smart product-service system (PSS) aims to achieve better u...

The rapid growth of air travel and aviation emissions in recent years has contributed to an increase in climate impact. Contrails have been considered one of the main factors of the aviation-induced climate impact. This paper deals with the formation of persistent contrails and its relationship with fuel consumption and flight time when flight alti...

The current healthcare system in Hong Kong is experiencing pressure due to constrained resources, with dramatic increases in inpatient services queue lengths, dissatisfaction with the working environment, unacceptable workforce arrangements and high turnover rate of hospital staff. To maintain the robustness of the healthcare system and a sustainab...

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/advanced-engineering-informatics/call-for-papers/emerging-intelligent-automation-and-optimisation Advanced Engineering Informatics Call for papers on the special issue: Emerging intelligent automation and optimisation methods for adaptive decision making

The rapid development and implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the engineering and manufacturing field have embraced a virtual identity to ensure nearly real-time adjustment. Warehouses are challenged to reassess its order fulfillment operations while simultaneously being provided with the opportunity t...

Airport congestion witnesses potential conflicts: insufficient terminal airspace and delay propagation within scrambled the competition in the terminal manoeuvring area. Re-scheduling of flights is needed in numerous situations, heavy traffic in air segments, holding patterns, runway schedules and airport surface operations. Robust optimisation for...

Smart manufacturing is the core of the modern production and manufacturing industry as it moves towards digitalization. The successful implementation of smart manufacturing needs the support of information technology, data technology, and operational technology, among which edge computing, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can play...

The impact of sustainable growth in the traffic volume of civil aviation has significantly influenced traffic delay by outstripping capacities of air and airport traffic resources. Robust optimisation to airside operations offers a perspicacious and holistic surveillance for flight activities in a near-terminal manoeuvring area and this study focus...

Smart mobile robots are deployed to the warehouse environments to improve the efficiency, because of its characteristics of high automation and flexibility characteristics. However, the trajectory planning is a great challenge especially when a number of mobile robotics operates in the warehouse simultaneously. This paper proposes a cyber-physical...

Air cargo transportation is an essential component in the freight transportation market, primarily due to the transportation requirements of time-sensitive products. Air cargo transportation plays an increasingly important role alongside economic development. Cargo flight network design and fleet routing selection significantly affect the performan...

An increasing number of people are conscious of the environmental awareness in various industries, particularly in city areas. It is now a popular trend for the urban catering service industry to outsource its labor-intensive activities, such as dishwashing, to a central dishwashing facility, in which labor force management and optimization are ess...

The deployment of automated guided vehicles in the automated warehouse has a great impact on the capacity in handling logistics activities. Simulation offers practical feedback and analytical solution at a designing stage of engineering applications. As for automated warehouse system, the optimal set of the combination of automated guided vehicles...

Heavy downpours always bring trouble to Hong Kong during the rainy season. Severe rainfalls and flooding will delay the transportation, cause the loss of property or even kill lives. However, there is limited research that investigated the problems of the drainage system and stormwater management. Regarding the Internet of Things (IoT) development...

Of landfilled municipal solid waste in Hong Kong, 33.2% is attributed to food waste. The government has set a waste reduction target to reduce by 40% the current food waste disposal at landfills by 2022 and has launched various policies and strategies to achieve this target. The Hong Kong Government is eager to control the utilisation level of food...

This study investigates the factors that influence customer loyalty to full-service carriers and low-cost carriers in the Hong Kong airline industry. A hypothesis model is proposed to examine the relationship of various drivers of customer loyalty. In this study, engagement in social media was used to assess the effect of advertising, while the imp...

This article aims at identifying significant factors influencing behavioural intention and resistance of patients toward electronic health record sharing systems by using PLS-SEM. A questionnaire was selected as the major data collection method and 243 responses were collected. Thus, this paper reviewed different theoretical models to illustrate th...

The number of publications related to airside operation research is increasing and gaining in popularity. This paper aims to provide researchers with a comprehensive and extensive overview of meta-heuristics application for aviation research, with a particular focus on the airside operations. The scope of airside operation research covers airspace...

Re-industrialization, which supports industrial upgrading and transformation, promotes smart production and high value-added manufacturing processes, and helps to create new momentum for the economic. Under the current situation, industrialists encounter several challenges to achieve re-industrialization. Firstly, the cost and technical thresholds...

Warehouse operations need to change due to the increasing complexity and variety of customer orders. The demand for real-time data and contextual information is requried because of the highly customised orders, which tend to be of small batch size but with high variety. Since the orders frequently change according to customer requirements, the sync...

Please refer to the full text from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554517301771